Menu

The recent release of the “Official Lego Ghostbusters” set inspires a writer to trace the history of the actual Ecto-1 car used in the 1984 Ghostbusters movie. To be honest, I didn’t finish reading “Ecto-1 and the Working Cadillac” because it’s getting late — but what I did get to was interesting.

Bonus: This “Fifty Shades of Grey” couples Halloween costume was used last year, but how many times did you see it? Maybe you can get away with it this year, and streamline the steps even more, to put together a last-minute costume (punching holes in the samples and putting them on a string?).

If you prefer to just “consume” you entertainment rather than create it, here’s a new take on “This is Halloween” from Tim Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” – the best Halloween-Christmas movie ever, I would venture to say.

Exciting news, especially for drunks with dead cell phone batteries. Scientists have devised a cell-phone battery powered by urine. Just right for those emergencies when you drunk-tweet way too much and then need to call for a ride home.

And here’s one more reason why I didn’t end up in an advertising job: First thing that comes to mind when I hear about this, is an advertising tie-in or cross-promotion between two very successful brands (so far, so good), Apple and Snapple. Their ad campaign could feature a new mega-size SnApple® (not legal in New York City) that could fully charge your iPhone, when used with the optional iPower® (uPower®? pPowe®r?) attachment.

At left is a non-artist’s rendering of celebrity spokesperson Mark Wahlberg charging his iPhone at an available ipWahl®.

SnApple® – for when you really, really, really need to go … online!

(I have to note that someone first did this back in 2005, but that battery was only usable to make one call, and maybe was more cumbersome than the current version, which is only the size of a car battery.)

… thanks to the Internet, Etsy and an interior designer with a possibly unhealthy obsession with TV, you can. Well, as long as you have the money, time and energy. It’s up to you to remodel the inside of your house to duplicate the set of How I Met Your Mother, or to build that duplicate of The Simpson’s house you’ve secretly craved/lusted after.

Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde, an interior designer from the Basque region of Spain, created floor plans of homes from famous TV shows, including Friends, The Simpsons, Golden Girls, I Love Lucy and more. (Also from movies, including Holly Golightly’s apartment from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and houses from Totoro and Up.) She will sell the floor plans to you via Etsy. And there you have it.

You can join the discussion of how accurate these plans are — The Gilmore Girls house did have another room added upstairs during season six, the question mark room in Friends was Monica’s junk room — at Happy Place. (This is a “lost” post that was scheduled to publish in May, but somehow did not find its way to the web.)

“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead—your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”

Almost 40 years after Rod Serling died, a well-known producer has bought the rights to his final script. J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions is said to be trying to develop it into a miniseries.

Rod Serling was a very successful TV scriptwriter — but he was probably more famous for his voice. As the host of The Twilight Zone on TV, he introduced each week’s episode — at first with voice-over narration, then in front of the camera.

Serling also lent his voice to radio ads for a candidate who entered the presidential primaries as an underdog. Which candidate was it?

At least that’s what this item at lifehacker says. I haven’t had coffee since early afternoon, so I don’t have the mental chops to properly evaluate these claims. And I haven’t had a beer today, so I can’t come up with a brilliant response. A few take-aways, though:

It says that one time you would do better without either coffee OR beer, is when doing ” detail-oriented or analytical projects like your finances.” No wonder I hate balancing my checkbook, or doing taxes.

“Eureka moments” come from a certain part of the brain — “a small spot above your right ear responsible for moments of insight.” For some reason, that reminds me of the old TV cliche where a character gets hit on the head and loses his memory, and someone has to hit him on the head again for him to regain it (I think it was usually a guy). How many boys tried this and left a companion with irreversible brain damage, I wonder? (As a former boy, I have to believe it would be a boy thing to actually try this, rather than a girl thing). Also, why did this occur to me? And please don’t hit me above the right ear to help me discover the answer.

To get the benefits described in the article, it says to use coffee and alcohol “always in moderation.” That doesn’t sound very writerly. At least not fiction writing. Or advertising writing.